Take Back the Mind

Katie Roiphe is a brave woman. She counters the "Take Back the Night"
ideology with what might be tagged "Take Back the Mind." Specifically,
she urges young women to think twice or three times about what they are
being urged to endorse in the name of victim feminism. Is there an
"epidemic" of rape on college campuses? Are all young men sexual
predators just waiting to pounce? Are all women helpless before the
vulgar jokes, the sexual metaphors, the "unsolicited ogling" (an
actionable offense on many campuses, by the way), the sexual innuendo,
the ride "alone" with a man on a first date, the many subtle and
egregious ways, so the ideology claims, men make their "power" felt, yea
even irresistible, in each and every encounter that involves what used
to be called the sexes before we started talking about "constructed
genders"? (One shudders, by the way, to recall that "reckless
eyeballing" got black men lynched in the Jim Crow South if their eyes
wandered the "wrong" way toward a white woman.)

Perhaps the best way for me to introduce Roiphe's text is to recall a
recent experience of my own. I was in Colorado, visiting family, and I
picked up the "Welcome Back to Campus" edition of the newspaper of a
large state institution in Northern Colorado. There were the usual
greetings to students from all the local merchants; the usual upbeat
message from the college president; the usual detailed information about
registration and the rest. But there was also a full page, put out under
the auspices of something called the "Equal Opportunity Developmental
Office," listing some twenty pointers about sexual harassment and date
rape. The one that caught my eye read: "Do not believe that if you dress
provocatively, drink to excess, and go to a boy's room you are asking
for sex or to blame if sex occurs."

Say what? Let me see if I get this straight. I dress provocatively. I
drink, not a few drinks, but "to excess." I go to a boy's room. Then I
wake up the next morning and accuse him of rape? Is that the plot line?
You bet it is. What is pernicious about this sort of business is that it
"constructs" the young woman as a wholly irresponsible agent whose one
act of agency consists in accusing the young man of an opportunistic (at
best), violent (at worst) act. She bears no responsibility of any kind
for the outcome. Surely, however, in the scenario at hand the young
woman's agency is involved in how she presents herself
("provocatively"), how she comports herself ("drinks to excess, goes to
boy's room"). How, then, can it be that she bears no responsibility-none
at all-for what subsequently happens?

That is the question Roiphe poses. She does not "blame" women for men's
actions. Rather, she suggests that there are spheres of co-
responsibility: men and women are in this together.

But the dominant narrative, now a standard genre, holds that women are
once more sexual innocents, men once more sexual brutes. Virginia Woolf
suggested that feminism needed to kill the "angel in the house," the
image of the eternally sacrificing, forever innocent wife. Having put
her out of her misery, what mainstream feminism appears to have done is
to relocate this angel: she is now in the polity, proclaiming her
rectitude and hurling anathema at men-all men-for all are either
rapists, proto-rapists, or pimps. In fact, Catharine MacKinnon, the
eminence grise behind this movement, claims that women who argue against
the "all men are rapists" formulae are also "pimps," they and their male
colleagues who worry about the civil rights of the accused and other
such "bourgeois niceties" readily dispensed with for the sake of the
greater cause.

And what is that cause? In a word: power. Not power of the sort Hannah
Arendt talks about, the power citizens create when they come together to
know a good in common that they cannot know alone. No, it is power as
"dominance over" some other. It is power as the imposition of my will
over yours. It is power of the most unredeemable variety. Roiphe wants
women to have power, yes, and she is a feminist, but one of the "older"
sort who believes men and women alike should share the risks and
adventures of life, read the books they want to read, get the educations
of which they are capable, enter the world on their own terms. This, of
course, is an idealized portrait of what the world is all about, but it
is far more attractive than that represented to the hapless
"freshpersons" Roiphe describes, bombarded with propaganda based on a
"rigid orthodoxy." "You couldn't suggest that the fascination with
sexual harassment had to do with more than sexual harassment, you
couldn't say that Alice Walker was just a bad writer, and the list of
couldn'ts went on and on." What happened to the energy and the verve,
Roiphe wonders, the "let's stride forth into the world" ethos of her
mother's generation of feminists?

Having spent twenty years in the academy, I find Roiphe's description of
the "impression of imminent danger" imparted to young women uncannily
apt. I recall some of the battier stuff from my own experience of such
incantations of pervasive, menacing danger, including a proposal by
feminists on one Northeast campus to cut down most of the trees and
bushes on the campus because rapists might be lurking there at all
hours. Now, mind you, the number of "stranger rapes" of the sort when
someone unknown to the woman accosts her in an alleyway, or breaks into
her house, or bursts out from bushes is quite small as a percentage of
the overall number of reported assaults. Of course, no more than murder
is one violent rape acceptable. But the idea that young women on our
elite campuses are uniquely vulnerable is nonsense.

If you check out the most reliable crime figures (U.S. Justice
Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, among others), you learn that
the rate of reported forcible rape is not on a rise at a rate markedly
out of line with other crimes of violence (constituting about 6 percent
of violent crimes overall) and, moreover, you learn that if you are a
white woman you are in the group least at risk for being a victim of a
violent crime of any kind. As Roiphe notes of her own campus, between
1983 and 1992 "only two rapes have been reported to campus security" at
Princeton University. In fact, crime statistics at both Princeton and
Harvard show that a man is "more likely to be attacked than a woman"
when he is walking to his dorm or home at night. These figures are
entirely consistent with all the others now available. So why don't
senior women, professors, and administrators take heart and cheer young
women on: "Yes, do be careful. Don't take unnecessary risks. But your
chances of being a victim of a violent attack are actually quite small."
Why indeed?

The explanation is this: the campus "rape crisis" feminists have shifted
the terrain. They have made rape virtually indistinguishable from sexual
intercourse itself-and that is, of course, their primary intent. Leading
movement ideologues claim there is no distinction, that, in fact, rape
and sex between men and women collapse into one another in a "rape
culture" of patriarchal dominance.

Hence all the talk about women as "powerless," and "empowered" only when
they make public confessions of the sort the culture now encourages,
shameless displays of the Oprah/Geraldo sort, as part of "rallies" on
campuses. You are not permitted into the conversation unless you
proclaim your victimization and pain. The result is to do real damage to
real victims whose pain is not so readily prepackaged and served up as
genre fare. As Roiphe writes: "These Princeton women, future lawyers,
newspaper reporters, investment bankers, are hardly the voiceless, by
most people's definition. But silence is poetic. Being silenced is even
more poetic."

"Breaking the silence," then, is a way to belong, to be one of the
group, not to stand out, not to question, not to challenge, not to
criticize, not to do any of the things college is there to encourage
young people to do. A watery therapeutic goo spreads over situations and
scenes. If you haven't been damaged by some awful thing some man has
done to you at some point you are either lying or repressing or
"silencing" other women by refusing to sign on. Roiphe notes several
scandals, women claiming victimization who confessed later that they had
been overcome by the moment and made up a story to "raise awareness"
even though a specific young man was falsely charged in the process. A
small price to pay, again, in the interests of the greater cause.

A recent piece in the New York Review of Books, titled "Guilty
If Charged," told a chilling tale of one hapless professor at a New
Hampshire university put through the torments of purgatory over what
were, if uttered, rather pathetic but harmless words. Vogue (of all
places) published a similar piece, "The Burden of Proof," by a woman
journalist fed up with the witch-hunt atmosphere victim feminism has
generated. She wrote: "It is OK in the name of a politically correct
cause to damn the truth, damn proof, damn rights to privacy or free
speech." A novelist in another "woman's magazine," under the title "Big
Sister is Watching You," tells tales of receiving hate letters from
"women who identified themselves as feminists," claiming that she had a
responsibility to present only "positive" (read: sinless) female "role
models." And because her female characters were not all purity,
goodness, and light, she was obviously another of those female pimps, in
MacKinnon's lexicon, doing the dirty work of patriarchy. So lots of
women are fed up, Roiphe being just one of a growing number.

Roiphe does yeoman's work in showing the ways in which responsible
scholars, male and female, have systematically discredited the inflated
"statistics" taken as gospel by rape crisis centers and the purveyors of
victim ideology. But her frustration, and that of anyone in this area
who wants to be able to respond with compassion and forthright decency
to the real victims, is that ideologues have no use for reliable data.
They are pushing a worldview in which everything falls into place. That
ideology relies on a world of woman as ur-victim, man as ur-victimizer.
The narrative unfolds predictably. If you say: "But if we live in a rape
culture, why is rape a crime? If, in fact, rape is the normalized way
men and women engage one another why do we not train men to rape, reward
them when they do? What have the police and courts been doing all these
years? What is all the aggressive law enforcement and prosecution
about?" And the answer is that all of this illegality and prosecution is
but a vast pretense, lulling "us women" into believing something is
really being done when, in fact, "the system" just pinpoints a
sufficient number of men to keep the whole edifice of the "rape culture"
intact overall. As my mother might say, "There's no talking to such
people." The still, small voice of reason gains no hearing in such
circles.

Two other points are worth mentioning: Roiphe, correctly, sees victim
feminism as a hankering for days of greater control, more policing of
male-female relations. She opposes all of that. For Roiphe, freedom and
responsibility are the key terms. I'm for both, and I think she is quite
right that the newly refurbished myth of lost innocence is "a trope-
convenient, appealing, politically effective." But perhaps, just
perhaps, eighteen-year-olds are not quite ready for a free-for-all. When
universities gave up in loco parentis, they set up very little
in its place. A lot of ideological busybodies have filled the vacuum;
people, mind you, who don't talk about "ethics" but only about "power"
and "empowerment" and "silencing" and the like. MacKinnon and her
minions explicitly eschew any talk of "ethics." For them that reeks of
Christianity, and Christianity is just another name we give to
"patriarchy." My argument, pace Roiphe, would be to bring ethics back in
to the discussion. Young people, at least the ones I talk to and see,
are searching, sometimes rather desperately, for an ethic of co-
responsible freedom and they are getting precious little assistance
from the campus powers-that-be.

Finally, and most disarmingly, Roiphe targets the assaultive, bitter
nature of the feminism she criticizes for its reductionistic treatment
of the literature she loves. She laments the cultural "dumbing down" in
which we have been engaged for a good many years now. A text is no
longer read; it is ripped apart. Roiphe describes a discussion in one of
her literature classes about the work of Edith Wharton. Wharton is taken
to task for being "antifeminist." One inflamed student tells Roiphe that
"Edith Wharton's characters are necessarily antifeminist because within
the hegemonic male discourse, it is impossible for the female voice to
be empowered." That, presumably, is that. Literature offers us powerful
and ambiguous worlds, worlds without clear-cut villains and victims;
worlds of nuance and innuendo; worlds of passion enacted and passion
restrained; worlds of unspoken yearning and the dignity of chosen
silence. Those are worlds the ideologues disdain and must work to
destroy because that is what "real life" is like.

If I were to sum up Roiphe's book, it would be quite simple. Her message
to feminists is: grow up. There is no world, anywhere, and there never
will be in which any group can or should exercise perfect and total
control. Were there such a world, it would be unlivable. In the
meantime, we must work to bind up the wounds, tend to the suffering,
succor the ill, serve the less fortunate. But they do not come to us in
tidy packages determined solely by gender. Perhaps it is time to remind
victim feminists that a man, too, like Shakespeare's Shylock, bleeds
when he is pricked. Is he not a human, imperfect like the rest of us?
Can we not try to walk into the future together, men and women in
relation, however imperfect, rather than as isolated and isolating
serial monads distinguished by our enmity, fear, suspicion, and loathing
of one another? Until our college campuses wake up and take on the real
purveyors of hatred, many of them ensconced in offices with nice-
sounding titles, enmity, fear, suspicion, and loathing it will be.
Friendship, even love, between men and women will blossom despite, not
because of, the atmosphere Roiphe so vividly describes.

Jean Bethke Elshtain a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of First
Things, is Centennial Professor of Political Science and Professor of
Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.